Love God or Go to Hell

Unfortunately I don’t remember who said this, but there was some pop singer who recently passed away who said something akin to, “God basically says to obey him or to go to hell.”
While Atheists may have nodded in agreement and Christians may have laughed it off without further thought, the words actually raise a very important problem that is inherent in monotheism.

The problem with monotheism is that the very nature of an omnipotent God brings with it very tyrannical implications. You have a Being of absolute power, creating and destroying at will, and this is justified because this Being is also supposed to be benevolent, or all-good. The problem here is that because the Being is omnipotent, He (or It) is also the standard for morality. In short, if God decides that he wants to doom a person (or people) to a horrible fate, He can justify it by citing Himself as the source of all moral good. Because he says so, it IS so, and no one can say otherwise.
Why worship God? Quite simple: fire is your only alternative.
Sounds like tyranny to me.

But among modern monotheism, Christianity alone does not suffer from this problem, simply because of Jesus. One of the primary reasons that Jesus allows Christianity to be separate from all other religions is because of the unusual nature of the deity’s relationship to his creations. Instead of existing above and dishing out arbitrary punishment, the deity actually gives of himself for his creation. The deity pays the debt of sin instead of punish humanity for it. Instead of arbitrarily inflicting suffering, He walks among the humans and suffers with them. Instead of a divide between God and man, He bridges the gap Himself.
So why worship God? Freely, and out of overwhelming gratitude.

The vision of Hell in this case is then reversed: Instead of a place that people are sent to by the mandates of an arbitrary dictator, it becomes instead a place that people seek out in order to escape God.
It reminds me of CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, in which there was a two-way bus that traveled every day between heaven and Hell, in which people could board and travel on freely, going to or from, staying or departing. No one stopped any of them, but many of them chose, nevertheless, to stay in Hell, because each of them found something that was more important to them than happiness/truth.

As for the rest of monotheism, the case for absolute tyranny by a morally ambiguous deity is pretty solid, and I don’t know how others, especially Muslims, will be able to fight their way out of the implications it brings without a savior figure.